Modern communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, computers, personal digital assistants) are capable of providing rich multimedia experiences to enhance everyday communications. Increasingly popular services such as short messaging service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), instant messaging, and electronic mail allow users to communicate easily through images, audio, video, and rich text. On the Internet, video-sharing sites have seen explosive growth over the past few years. Many expect this trend to continue and even accelerate well into the future.
However, there is a significant portion of users who are not able to fully participate in this multimedia revolution. These users include those who are hearing- or sight-impaired, those who are in environments that restrict one or more multimedia formats (e.g., noisy environments where hearing is difficult, driving where the driver cannot be distracted by video displays, etc.), and those who have devices not capable of rendering all available media formats. Many of these users have to forgo the multimedia experience, and in some cases, cannot communicate at all without additional equipment. For example, users who are hearing-impaired have traditionally used a telecommunications device for the deaf/teletype (TDD/TTY) to communicate. Another approach involves a live operator to facilitate communications among such users.
Another problem involves communicating between parties of differing capabilities. Each communicating party would have to know in advance the capability of the every other party before initiating the communication session to ensure that communications can be completed. For example, a party has to be cognizant not to send picture messages to a sight-impaired party or not to call a colleague who is in an important meeting.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that provides for automated and seamless translation of communication sessions and associated media from, to, and between parties of differing impairments and media capabilities using existing communication devices.